The second image of the "Men's basketball team roster, 1983 season" is regularly the most popular image on the site. This is the team that won the NCAA tournament.

OK, the images aren't always all this interesting or quick in appearing. This was all me on a staging server. One of the things I like the most about this feature, though, is how I'm always finding new gems in the collection that I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

Note the two images of the DH Hill Library at the end before the video loops again.

Oh, and this is HTML5 video embedded into the slide deck as data-URIs. Check out [my blog post on creating HTML and PDF Slideshows Written in Markdown with DZSlides, Pandoc, Guard, Capybara Webkit, and a little Ruby](http://jronallo.github.io/blog/html-and-pdf-slideshows-with-dzslides/).

The past few months the image of Tony Warren at the bottom left has been popular. He is the father of current NC State basketball player Tony "T. J." Warren, Jr..

I had hoped they'd still be in the NCAA tournament at this time.

I initially used Pusher.com for this and some other apps. I found it to be a great service and simple to get set up and going with WebSockets. I've sinced converted most applications over to using a locally hosted Node.js and socket.io server.

Since this is more a simple stream and everything flows in one direction, it would have been possible to use Server Sent Events instead of WebSockets.

Font Awesome and LibreOffice Draw made slides like this easy to make.

Finally some code! About time!

Rails and Blacklight make it easy to add this kind of functionality. Swing by the Project Blacklight table to talk with someone.

Quick Tip: I use the ability to create different rooms for different applications, but also for different environments. Staging and production versions of the same application can use the same WebSocket server by being in rooms named after the application plus environment.

You can open up your console and play with this right now.

// Create a new WebSocket
var socket =
new WebSocket("ws://echo.websocket.org");
// Just log to the console when you
// receive a message from the server.
socket.onmessage = function(event) {
console.log(event.data);
}
// Send a message to the server.
// See it echo back in this example.
socket.send("Sending a message!");
// close the connection
socket.close();

pew pew

Thanks to Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi for the original visualization and audiation and for putting an open source license on their code.

What kind of words or messaging to attract interactions are you using or would you test out?

This project is code named SVIZ. It doesn't really mean anything. We picked the catchiest short golink.ncsu.edu that we could get that had "viz" in it. It reminded one team member of Swiz, a DC hardcore band. I don't know if that's a good thing.

This was also integrated into our Blacklight-based digital collections site.